New geospatial data types and functions with BigQuery GIS
In case you missed it, we announced some exciting new GIS features for Google BigQuery at the Cloud Next conference in July. This overview is excerpted from two posts that originally appeared on the Google Cloud Blog: “What’s happening in BigQuery” and “Bridging the gap between data and insights”.
Geospatial data is a critical element of modern IoT, telematics, retail, and manufacturing workflows. Accordingly, we partnered with the Google Earth Engine team on BigQuery GIS (geographic information systems) to integrate geospatial data types and functions as first class citizens within BigQuery. Our implementation, currently in alpha, uses the S2 library, which now has over a billion users through products such as Google Earth Engine and Google Maps.
Our new functions and data types follow the SQL/MM Spatial standard and will be familiar to PostGIS users and anyone already doing geospatial analysis in SQL. This makes workload migrations to BigQuery easier. We also support WKT and GeoJSON, so getting data in and out to your other GIS tools will be easy.
Another benefit from the Earth Engine partnership is our collaboration on a lightweight visualization tool called BigQuery Geo Viz. This is a companion app designed for BigQuery users that want to plot and style their geospatial query results on a map.
Using the BigQuery Geo Viz view and the New York Citibike Public Dataset, we can quickly map bike availability and station capacity across the city.
Supported geographic types
BigQuery GIS now supports the following geographic types: Point, Linestring, Polygon, Multi-polygon, and Collections. Functions will look and feel very familiar to users of PostGIS as they follow the SQL/MM Spatial standard.
Details of the new functionality are in the table below. Alternately, you can learn more by watching our breakout session at Next ’18 or this quick three-minute summary.
BigQuery GIS and BigQuery Geo Viz are in public alpha now. To request access to both, please fill out this form. We’ll whitelist your GCP projects and send you the BigQuery GIS documentation.
